The Blog Lives! And Now Partnered!

Hi all, I know many of you have reached out to me wondering where my posts have gone! Well, I’ve been spending a LOT of time over at HowToPriest.com as I am an admin over at H2P. Additionally H2P has been the home for both my Disc and Holy Guides all expansion long. H2P is a great community for priests of all specs. As of today, all future posts will be at www.howtopriest.com/blog The H2P blog will have all original content, cover ALL THREE SPECS of the priest class, and include articles by the admin and moderation team at H2P as well as guest posts by our Senior Members! Additionally the H2P Blog will be the exclusive home for all new content (and many old/high traffic/reference material from) Tales of a …

Update on Heroic Throne of Thunder Raiding ...

I’ve been pretty quiet as of late on the blog, but I hope to do some more visual posting. Firewalls at work have ramped up preventing me from doing ANY editing at the office— but video posts are always more fun I think. I’ll be posting a retrospective post in the coming days… but until then here’s a little treat!

5.2 Discipline Guide – Thunderstruck!

Now yes, we know 5.2 is just riddled with tons and tons of AC/DC references all over the internet… so why not one more? Sorry! I have updated my 5.2 guide which can be found in full as well as discussion over at HowToPriest.com here. The Holy Guide will be updated in the next 24-48 hours, although it has minimal changes from 5.1! (Grrrr….that irritates me on a number of levels. Holy’s shortcomings being overlooked). Hope everyone is enjoying the Throne of Thunder, stay tuned for the Holy update, as well as a State of the Union 5.2 in the next week. Keep calm, and keep healing.

Holy and Disc Best Practices

Inspired by a post by my good friend Vixsin, I’ve decided to do a quick “Best Practices” post. In the interest of full-disclosure, she did toss me an email while I was at a work conference asking for a “best practices” quick hit-list… and I promised her I would do it…. several times. But, I simply let work get ahead of me and forgot to email her back… so, my dear Vix, I apologize! Hopefully this helps somewhat! But before I dive into the meat and potatoes of the post, I will provide a brief update on myself: it has been a chaotic January for me. Work has been quite busy with a lot of travel, my SO and I are on the property hunt here in Boston (Rant: SO …

Keep Calm and Keep Healing

Despite having a crazy busy month both in game and out, I’ve spent some time reading at the official forums, the HowToPriest.com forums, Twitter, and a number of emails I have received… and there is a very large negative cloud over the healing priest community right now. These negative statements seem to mostly revolve around our output (both as Holy and Disc) as well as our mana regeneration. First let me just say… In all seriousness, people need to KEEP CALM. The state of the priest is not as dire as some of the forum posts I have seen might suggest. Perhaps the biggest question I am seeing all over forums (official forums, H2P, and otherwise): Why are priests so under-powered and horrible right now? This. Is. A. Fallacy. I am sick of …

Mana Regen vs Throughput

Mana management is a huge part of our game now in Mists of Pandaria. Gearing, gemming, enchanting, and spec choices will be pivotal in how your longevity impacts these first few raids— particularly since so many of these fights are much longer than we have typically seeing in Cata and even WotLK. Endurance will be just as important as our raw output– or will it? To find out that answer you should be asking yourself these questions: 1. Am I spec’d into the most appropriate regen model for this fight? Are you struggling to find gaps to fit your PW: Solace in? Are you getting fewer than (in aggregate) 8 Solaces per minute? Would Mindbender work better for you? What about FDCL? 2. Are you using your potions at an opportune time? …

Mists of Pandaria: Initial Impressions

First I am excited to say that my Goal of Hitting Realm First! Priest was completed! That was only one-upped by the fact that I also shared Realm First! 90 as well. My friend, guildmate and hunter, Esoth, was Realm First! 90, but delayed his final quest turn-in nearly 40 minutes while my 5 man team struggled with some of the final gather X# of items quests and were getting screwed with the RNG drops.— and we all dinged 90 and shared the Feat of Strength within 30 seconds of each other. Overall the grind to 90 was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the excitement in guild chat, mumble, and my 5 man team. We were done in 13-14 hours if I recall– not too bad. (I didn’t look at the time …

Stay Healthy During Mists of Pandaria

Yes… I am planning on staying up until I hit 90. I am going for Realm First! Priest with a few of my other guildies going for their realm first classes as well. Being a Bostonian, this means Mists launches at 3:00 am local time for me– certainly a daunting task. I will, however, be sleeping a full 7 hours before launch, so I should be IRL “Well Rested”. How much XP will we need to burn through? As of a few days ago, the total XP you needed to go from 85 – 90 is: 97,500,000. (source)… yikes! What is most important if you are staying up late (or as the case may be: early) to grind to 90 is to take care of yourself! Expansion launches are often a time …

Holy Word: Sanctuary – Scaling in Mists...

Holy Word: Sanctuary has been a spell that has been in flux since its introduction at the start of Cataclysm… and that continues to happen even on the Beta– HW: Sanc has undergone a few changes in preparation for Mists of Pandaria, one of which Ghostcrawler commented on from a question I posted in the Beta Class Feedback Forum. ”Sanctuary should scale with haste like Efflorescence. It just adds more ticks.” Well, I must say I was pretty darn excited! It didn’t make sense that it didn’t scale from haste previously. I quickly logged into the beta to test out the breakpoints I had previously calculated and to see these additional ticks at work… But wait… they added Haste scaling, but took away mastery’s scaling from HW: Sanctuary. Noooooo! I …

Chakra and Why You Should Be Concerned

I don’t like writing posts like this – and by that I mean posts where I completely disagree with the direction the development team is going with the priest class. That said, I do believe and trust that Blizzard can develop and balance their game correctly. The development team for Mists of Pandaira has been really good at communicating this beta, and the number of blue comments on the beta forums seems much greater than before. (GC has been great at engaging us.. as well as the CM team on Twitter as well. I have to tip my hat to them there). However, it doesn’t mean I love every change that they make… and sometimes, its important for us to point out changes that could be missed… and I do …

Priest Resources

Every healer knows that having your UI and Raid Frames be functional for you, is a priority. A clean and functional UI is something I obsess over. So, the first thing I needed to do was purge my old UI, and really think about what AddOns I actually USED. There are some mods out there, that I simply do not like or use – read: Clique, Healbot, and Grid. Here is what I came up with. All these work with 3.0.X versions of WoW, and thus will require minimal tweaking once Wrath launches- which is key.

Deadly Boss Mods – Pretty much a must have for anyone who plans on stepping foot into any raid.

PowerAuras – fantastic mod that provides visual cues when you get certain buffs/debuffs. Great to show Imp/Holy Concentration, Surge of Light, Borrowed Time, trinket procs to set up combos. (Very helpful to time HC procs with Inner Focus to break the Five Second Rule)

InstantHealth – Must have for any healer. Fantastic mod that reads the combat log to update raid frame HP, doesn’t wait for the server to push the HP back to the client. Provides quicker results and every healer knows that “Oh, I just missed that heal” on their target can literally be a fraction of a second.

Omen - Threat meter. Nuff said

PitBull – Unit frames mod. If you do any UI customization having something that does this for you is a near must have. I actually make up my own “customized” version of “Grid” using the Pitbull raid frames.

FuBar - Mod that allows you to have easy and organized access to your other existing mods, further it also provides valuable information on the bar itself, through small and resource light addons.- DurabilityFu: Displays durability, cost to repair at all reputation levels, and has an auto repair feature.- ExperienceFu: XP per hour, session, and time to level calculator.- MoneyFu: Gold earned per hour, session, and total gold across all toons.